Less Than Half Of Digital Marketers Say They Are Highly Proficient At Digital Marketing

In a somewhat sobering poll of 1,000 US marketers, just 48 percent of those who identified as “digital marketers” said they feel highly proficient in digital marketing. And they think even less of their cohort: only 40 percent think their team colleagues are highly proficient in digital marketing.

The study, titled Digital Distress: What Keeps Marketers Up At Night was commissioned by Adobe and produced by Edelman Berland, measures marketers’ confidence in their own skills, effectiveness and ability to measure the impact of their digital efforts.

Yet, from even more depressing stats such as the fact that only 9 percent of respondents strongly agree their digital marketing is working or that only a third said their companies are highly proficient in digital marketing, come some brighter rays of hope from marketers at the companies that are out performing their competitors — online and off.

Marketers at high performing companies are more than twice as likely to rate their companies as proficient in digital marketing than those at low performing companies.

Seventy percent of high performers say they know which marketing channels are most effective, compared with just 52 percent of low performers.

High performing companies are also investing more in digital. While 60 percent of all marketers polled expect their companies will increase their investments in digital marketing technology this year, seventy one percent of high performers said their companies are investing more in digital programs this year compared to just 52 percent among low performers.

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About The Author

As Third Door Media's paid media reporter, Ginny Marvin writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She provides search marketing and demand generation advice for ecommerce companies and can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

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Fencemaster

Well done Ginny. Digital is full to the brim of ‘managers’ and ‘leaders’ who actually can’t DO anything apart from talk a lot and produce extremely lengthy powerpoint presentations. Linkedin’s much-discussed forthcoming ‘Denounce’ feature will certainly be putting a partridge among the pigeons.

Chris

Not sure what to make of these results. Marketers at high performing companies tend to rate their own marketing as highly proficient while marketers at low performing companies rate their marketing as under proficient? Seems sort of logical, doesn’t it? And I don’t know about others, but with the ever changing landscape of digital marketing, I am pretty hard on myself and always think I need to know and learn more. Beware anyone claiming expertise in everything. And giving yourself the label proficient seems sort of ambiguous. Proficient how?